Pepsis Super Bowl Ad Blitz Aims for a Big Payoff

A giant crop circle appeared in fields around Phoenix this week, the first in a series of
strange desert sightings expected in Arizona in the days leading up to Sundays Super
Bowl. The extraterrestrial-like cultivation is not a signal from aliens who have taken a
sudden interest in football. The stunts are the work of Pepsi, which is trying to make a
giant splash with a multifaceted, monthslong Super Bowl campaign that culminates on
Sunday with a 30-second game-day spot and its sponsorship of Katy Perrys halftime
show.
If you want to be part of pop culture, then you have to be part of the biggest event in
the country, said Simon Lowden, Pepsis chief marketing officer for North American
beverages. If you want to be part of the conversation, you have to be there in as big a
way as possible.
The strategy illustrates the extremes that marketers are going to in an attempt to get the
biggest payoff from the $4.5 million they spend for 30 seconds of commercial time
during the big game.
The spotlight used to be solely on those ads. But the web has transformed the
marketing game plan: Advertisers now increasingly extend the process, trying to build
viewership for the commercials in stages, by posting the spots and teasers for them
online before the game, as well as creating social media campaigns around them.
Over the years, Super Bowl marketing has evolved into a year-round exercise,
especially for the biggest spenders, like Anheuser-Busch and PepsiCo, which owns
Pepsi and Doritos, which also advertises during the game. PepsiCo ranks among the
top three Super Bowl advertisers based on spending from 2010 to 2014, paying $76.6
million on network advertising alone in the last five years, according to WPPs Kantar
Media.
It used to be that the whole thing lived and died based on what happened on game day
on the TV in the living room, said Allen Adamson, chairman of the North American
region of Landor Associates, a brand consulting firm. Now, it is, How do you manage
up to the top of the mountain and how do you manage it down?
NBC, which is televising the game, said on Wednesday that it had sold out advertising
time for the broadcast. Spots started at a record $4.5 million for 30 seconds of
commercial time. The broadcaster said that it had sold slightly more than 70 total
commercial units, with 15 first-time Super Bowl advertisers buying spots.

Pepsi, which is sponsoring the Super Bowl halftime show for the third time in a row this
year, starts planning its marketing blitz soon after the clock runs out on the previous
years game. The idea this year was to try to bring the excitement surrounding the show
to different places across the country, staging events to create material for commercials
as well as for people to share their experiences on social media.
The brands efforts included more than 40 promotional activities, starting on
Thanksgiving Day with a spot that featured a Pepsi-sponsored concert for military
veterans featuring the country music star Blake Shelton.
Other promotions included a partnership with Comedy Central for a web series with
Craig Robinson and his band The Nasty Delicious, as well as a concert in Rochester
this month featuring the Norwegian musicians Nico and Vinz. The concert was the result
of a Hype Your Hometown contest in which people could win tickets to go on the field
for the halftime show, or for a concert in their hometown.
This week, the brand is staging various strange occurrences in attempts to build
anticipation for the commercial that leads directly into Ms. Perrys performance. It is
drawing inspiration from the desert lore of mysterious sightings, in the same way that
Pepsi found inspiration last year in the Super Bowls host city with a spot that
transformed the New York City skyline into various musical instruments.
The crop circle, 360 feet in diameter and decorated as a Pepsi logo, appears in a field in
Glendale, Ariz., about half a mile away from the University of Phoenix Stadium, where
the game will be played. People who fly into the Phoenix airport will be able to see the
circle.
The circle is the first of several stunts Pepsi has planned. It is also releasing a teaser
spot that shows a Pepsi vending machine and delivery truck beaming into the sky. The
hope is that those efforts, along with the halftime show which in recent years has
drawn more viewers than the actual game will help the marketer stand out from the
pack of advertisers and build anticipation for its campaign.
We just want to create an out-of-this-world experience, said Mr. Lowden, of Pepsi.

Pinterest Pushing Deeper Into Ads

A quick glance at the digital scrapbook Pinterest makes it seem like the anti-Facebook.
It has no stream filled with friends faces and baby pictures, but rather a sprawling,
colorful grid of recipes, photographs of clothes and a shopping list of presents to buy for
loved ones. Yet Pinterest wants to be like Facebook in one notable way: Soon some of
the slick-looking photos on its site may be advertisements from the worlds biggest
consumer brands ads, Pinterest hopes, users actually want to see.
On New Years Day, the company plans to start selling ads on the site to marketers,
sounding the call that Pinterest is open for business and that it wants to compete for ad
dollars with the likes of Google, Twitter and Facebook.
It is the first major step for Pinterest toward building a scalable business. And though its
major competitors have been pursuing advertising for years, Pinterest says its strength
stems from the very nature of its service, in which users create collections of items they
want or gather information about places they want to go so-called aspirational
content. On Facebook, you think about friends, and on Twitter you think about news,
said Joanne Bradford, Pinterests head of partnerships, who is responsible for building
the companys business. On Pinterest, you think about what you want to do, where you
want to go, what you want to buy.
Think of Pinterest as a kind of digital corkboard for things you want to collect. A newly
engaged couple, for instance, might type wedding gifts into the sites search function,
and Pinterest will serve up photos of items like matching bath towels, flatware or baking
pans. From there, the couple can pin, or save for later, any items they are interested in
or want others to buy for them.
Begun in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2010, the Pinterest site has grown to about 70 million users
globally, according to estimates from comScore, the research company. Pinterest, which
employs more than 450 people and is now based in San Francisco, has raised more
than $760 million in venture capital. Despite having little to no revenue to speak of, the
company is valued by investors at $5 billion, a striking amount even by Silicon Valley
standards.

Ultimately, Pinterest aims to do for discovery what Google did for search. That is,
instead of knowing what you want and letting Google tell you exactly where to find it,
Pinterest wants to introduce people to new experiences and new things to buy.
That is where the advertising comes in. Introduced to a handful of advertising partners
in a limited test in June, the new ads look much like the other content on Pinterest.
Marketers pay to create a Promoted Pin ad, and target it to certain groups of people
based on their location, sex and the type of topic they have shown interest in.
For example, a Promoted Pin from Kraft Foods, one of Pinterests early partners, could
show up on a Pinterest board of chili recipes collected and browsed by someone who is
on a mobile phone while grocery shopping.
Pinterest says early results are promising. Brand advertisers see Promoted Pins repinned, or shared by users, an average of 11 times per advertisement. That means that
every ad will be seen, on average, by 30 percent more people than the brand paid to
show it to because users have shared the ad with friends.
Creating ads that people not only enjoy but share with others is something marketers
strive for but rarely accomplish.
Were aiming for the holy grail here: trying to provide the right content to the right
people, at the right time, said Dana Shank, an associate director at Kraft Foods. To be
on a platform where people are actively looking for that content? Thats invaluable to
us.
Many social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, have similar socalled native advertising products, or ads that are made to look like the content on the
service. But on Pinterest an advertisement for, say, Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal,
which is made by General Mills, another early Pinterest partner, may look a little more
natural when mixed in with the wealth of recipes on the site.
Advertisers tell us Pinterest is the only place where their brand feels truly welcome,
Ms. Bradford said.
Still, Pinterest has a lot of catching up to do. Facebook, which has more than 1.3 billion
users, generated $3.2 billion in revenue last quarter. Google, the worlds pre-eminent
search engine, had $16.5 billion in revenue for that period.
Pinterest definitely has a lot of potential, because the nature of the activity is totally
commercial, said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer. But if you look
at where its business is compared to Facebook or Twitter, it still has a lot of work to do.
It may also be a challenge for Pinterest to persuade advertisers to create custom
content for yet another social media platform, a process that can be labor intensive and,
if done poorly, costly and ineffective. Facebook hosts sessions called publishing
garages, which help teach ad agencies and brands how to make the best type of ads for

Facebook. Twitter, too, has a list of best practices and its own services for big-spending
marketers.
Pinterest wants to try something similar. It will soon start the Pinstitute, its way of
teaching marketers how to create the best ads for the site. All businesses will be invited
to attend one of the quarterly sessions, which will begin in March.Eventually Pinterest
wants to offer online courses and tools tailored to small and midsize businesses.
But for now, Pinterest is focused on big brands with deep pockets especially those
that offer products that may not seem to be as natural a fit for Facebook or Twitter. On
a lot of other social platforms, if people dont see your information in their main stream,
its not necessarily going to be seen at all, said Jason Merideth, a brand manager for
Dreyers Grand Ice Cream, another early Pinterest partner. Pinterest is great because
our ads are passed around for a long time like any other content.
Newcomers Buy Ad Time at the Super Bowl
About a month after advertising on television for the first time, the makers of the free
mobile game Heroes Charge decided at the last minute that they wanted to make a
much bigger splash: a commercial during televisions biggest advertising event, the
Super Bowl.
UCool, the tiny studio in Silicon Valley that produces the app, announced on Friday that
it was paying $2.25 million for a 15-second spot during the fourth quarter of the game
on Sunday. Because the start-up decided only a few weeks ago to buy the ad, it did not
have time to find a Madison Avenue agency to produce it and created the spot
featuring its red-haired Emberstar character itself. It is not as easy as opening up
the telephone book or Googling best ad agency and getting it started, said Benjamin
Gifford, the company vice president for user experience. Those agencies might not
think that we are being serious.
UCool is one of 15 first-time advertisers that will compete for attention on Sunday
against the usual lineup of deep-pocketed brands peddling beverages, snacks, cars and
technology. Super Bowl XLIX features the most newcomers since the burst of the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century. A lot of these brands are not in the cultural
conversation, so its an immediate jump-start, said Jay Russell, executive creative
director at the ad agency GSD&M, which is behind the spot for Avocados From Mexico,
another first-time advertiser for the game. Good or bad, you will be known.
For those companies, the risks and rewards can be especially high. The $4.5 million
that it costs for 30 seconds of commercial time can represent more than 15 percent of a
small companys entire media budget for the year, according to Kantar Media, a
research firm owned by the advertising conglomerate WPP. If the spot succeeds, the

marketer stands to gain instant attention and acclaim. If it flops, the marketer has most
likely wasted a huge chunk of money.
This years first-timers include a mix of little-known brands seeking to use the Super
Bowls giant stage the game routinely draws more than 110 million viewers who pay
keen attention to the ads to build awareness. Those advertisers include Heroes
Charge; Loctite, a maker of superglue; Jublia, a treatment for toenail fungus; Wix.com, a
website-building service; and Mophie, a maker of smartphone accessories.
We want to make this brand famous, said Pierre Tannoux, the director of marketing at
Henkel Adhesives International, whose Loctite brand is spending more money for 30
seconds of commercial time than what it usually spends on ads for the year. The
contents of the ad are a secret until game day. Eric Mason, director of communications
at Wix, echoed the sentiment. Were one of the larger companies that people havent
really heard of yet, he said. We wanted to go to the big stage to let people know who
we are.Also advertising in the game for the first time are more prominent brands that
decided to try to break through the annual marketing blitz this year. Those include
Carnival Cruise Lines, Skittles candy and Always feminine products.
For us, the goal of being in the Super Bowl is about changing the conversation about
cruising, said Ken Jones, vice president for corporate marketing at Carnival
Corporation, which created four ads and asked consumers to vote for their favorite. We
want to reach people who have never cruised at all. Some marketing experts said that
the stampede of new advertisers was possible because several stalwarts decided to sit
on the sidelines. Many automakers, for example, including Volkswagen, Jaguar and
Lincoln, did not buy time this year. (The game last year featured 11 car brands,
according to Kantar Media.)
Some analysts cited the lackluster market for television ads. Although spots in this
years game sold out, it took much longer than in years past. NBC, which is
broadcasting the game, announced only on Wednesday that it had sold out. By
contrast, Fox, which showed the game last year, said all its ad time had sold about two
months before kickoff. It was a challenging ad sales marketplace. I wont diminish that,
said Seth Winter, executive vice president for ad sales at NBC Universal News and
Sports Group. This was not the easiest exercise I have been through. Asked whether
the quality of the ads would suffer this year because of the low production value that
often comes with first-time advertisers, Mr. Winter said that the group had reviewed
storyboards and did not expect the entertainment factor to decline.
The game on Sunday features the most newcomers since 2000. Called the Dot-com
Super Bowl, that Super Bowl featured 19 first-time advertisers and is considered a

symbol of the free-spending excess of the period. Several of those marketers no longer
exist, like the pet supply site Pets.com, whose ad featured a sock puppet dog crooning
the Chicago love song If You Leave Me Now. (Pets.com closed 10 months after
running that spot.)
Over the last few years, the number of first-time advertisers at the Super Bowl has
steadily climbed, with new entrants accounting for about 23 percent of last years ad
roster, according to Kantar.
Chobani, the Greek yogurt brand, was new to the Super Bowl last year. Its 60-second
spot featured a 1,400-pound bear ransacking a grocery store in search of a wholesome,
natural snack. Peter McGuinness, the companys chief marketing officer, said that the
ad, along with other related digital and social media promotions, significantly bolstered
awareness of the brand. Before the game, about a third of Americans had heard of the
company; after the game, awareness increased to 40 percent and sales surged 20
percent, he said.Mr. McGuinness said that Chobani was not returning this year, opting
instead to run more promotions throughout the year. But, referring to the Super Bowl
spot, he said, I wouldnt have not done it.Indeed, most brands do not return to the big
game the year after they make their debut at the Super Bowl. Two exceptions are
Squarespace, the website-building service, and WeatherTech, a maker of automotive
floor mats, both of which advertised last year. It is high stakes, high stress, but the
returns when you do it right are so vast and almost always worth it, said David Lubars,
chief creative officer at Omnicoms BBDO, which is working on several spots for the
game.
Catalogs, After Years of Decline, Are Revamped for Changing Times
In this digital age when filling a shopping cart requires little more than clicking on a
screen, the printed retail catalog keeps vying for a place on the coffee table. From
Anthropologie to American Girl, Pottery Barn to Patagonia, retailers are still relying on
direct mail even as they spend considerable resources on improving their websites to
accommodate the steady increase in online shopping. Some of their catalog forays,
however, barely resemble the traditional merchandise book. These days, retailers are
employing devices like adventure tales and photo spreads of wildlife to catch a
shoppers eye, hoping to secure purchases online or in a store.
Luring a specific customer base seems to be part of the strategy underlying J. C.
Penneys surprise announcement this month that it would revive a home goods catalog
in March, three years after the struggling company discontinued all such mailings. Its
new version will focus not on recruiting new customers but on reaching existing ones,

according to a spokeswoman. Whether the company will resume a regular schedule for
sending out seasonal or general merchandise catalogs remains unclear.
J. C. Penney is making a big statement, said Bruce Cohen, a retailprivate
equity strategist at Kurt Salmon, a consulting firm. Its a pronouncement in favor of
what all retailers are recognizing that there are moments when people want to slow
down, and theres still an important place for the catalog.
After years of decline, the number of catalogs mailed in the United States increased in
2013, to 11.9 billion, according to the Direct Marketing Association, a trade group. While
that figure is about 60 percent of what it was at its peak in 2007, some analysts say the
recent 1 percent rise in mailed catalogs, coupled with the care retailers are putting into
them, may signal something of a renaissance.
Not all catalogs will rebound in this environment. The parent company of SkyMall, the
in-flight shopping magazine, filed for bankruptcy last week. But Paul Swinand, an
analyst for Morningstar, called that catalog different from most with its quirky assortment
of goods. Its not about brand with SkyMall, he said. Theres nothing emotional about
it.
However small, the recent resurgence in direct mail may be explained by a better
understanding of the catalogs power to drive sales, Mr. Cohen said. He pointed to
Lands End as an early example. In 2000, that retailer reduced the number of catalogs it
sent consumers. It experienced a $100 million drop in sales as a result, according to
research by Kurt Salmon. Lands End later added a pop-up survey to its website and
found that 75 percent of customers who were making purchases had first reviewed the
catalog. Sometimes the only way to realize how important the catalog is, is to take it
away, Mr. Cohen said. About 90 million Americans make purchases from catalogs,
according to the Direct Marketing Association; nearly 60 percent of them are women.
Consumers who receive catalogs spend an average of $850 annually on catalog
purchases, according to the American Catalog Mailers Association
For many brands, catalogs are the single most effective driver of online and in-store
sales, according to analysts and retailers. Recognizing that, American Girl, a subsidiary
of Mattel, recently increased the number it sent out, spending more on catalogs last
year than in any year over the last decade, according to Kathy Monetti, senior vice
president for marketing. Some stores, like Anthropologie, rely so heavily on catalogs
that they make them their principal form of advertising. We dont call it a catalog; we
call it a journal, said Susy Korb, chief marketing officer of Anthropologie, whose
materials show women wearing dresses in fields, on beaches and where the rolling
heather meets the broad, brisk sky, as one recent spread detailed.Of course were
trying to sell clothes and accessories, Ms. Korb said, but its more to inspire and
engage.
Patagonia has produced long-form marketing materials, commissioning essays for
them. Last year, in addition to publishing 10 or so traditional catalogs, the company sent
two built around themes, including one on falconry. That catalog featured photo spreads

of children with condors in Chile and wildlife volunteers releasing rehabilitated red-tailed
hawks in California, alongside first-person reflections. The bird on my fist is an
opportunist, one read. I like to think its there because of the patient discipline I
exercise.
That catalog included only a handful of products among them a green trucker hat,
jeans and brightly colored backpacks on four of the final pages in the 43-page book.
Dmitri Siegel, executive creative director and vice president of e-commerce for
Patagonia, called the catalogs a way were speaking to our closest friends and people
who know the brand really well. Mr. Siegel added that Patagonia had begun printing on
100 percent recycled paper. We had to make some trade-offs in terms of circulation
and other expenses, but it brought the mode of communication in line with our values,
he said.Across segments, retailers are seeking to make their catalogs more of an
experience, and celebrating print as something retro. Ikea recently produced a
humorous advertisement for its catalog. Its not a digital book, or an e-book, the ad
says. Its a bookbook. The 2015 Ikea catalog comes fully charged, and the battery life
is eternal.
Though it is a department store with different customer demographics than that of
Patagonia or Ikea, J. C. Penney is not dissimilar in having a lofty, experiential vision for
the new catalog. The scenes tell a story, said Kate Coultas, a J. C. Penney
spokeswoman. While the retailers Big Book, containing up to 1,000 pages, was
discontinued in 2009, the company kept producing short, niche catalogs on segments
like school uniforms or outdoor furniture until 2012. The coming catalog will strike a
balance, with 120 pages featuring a broad variety of home goods, Ms. Coultas said.
Melissa Berggren of Minneapolis, Minn., a mother of two, said the revival of the J. C.
Penney catalog surprised her but made sense. Weve gotten used to companies
printing less and less, she said. But more of us are coming back to our mailboxes.
Ms. Berggren said she regularly studied the Pottery Barn catalogs. Its not about
getting a deal, she said. Its about looking at different settings, how theyre decorated.
Not all mailings get her attention, she said, adding that she never looked at the tabloidtype mailers from Macys regularly stuffed in her mailbox.
Felix Carbullido, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for WilliamsSonoma brands, including Pottery Barn and West Elm, said the companys commitment
to catalogs had not wavered but that its view of them had changed. Years ago it was a
selling tool, and now its become an inspirational source, he said, likening catalogs to
magazines. We know our customers love a tactile experience.
Mr. Swinand of Morningstar pointed to Tiffany & Companys Blue Book catalog said
to be the first catalog mailed in the United States, in 1845. Thats the type of thing you
might want to keep on your coffee table for the whole year, he said. Its not the big
book Sears catalog, which was sort of a print version of the Internet before it existed.
Asked if it might consider reviving a catalog, Sears declined to comment.

Some consumers feel that retailers should ease off on sending catalogs. Theyre a
nuisance, said Lee Wright, who works in sales for a software company in Arlington, Va.
While Mr. Wright nostalgically remembered poring over the Sears catalog in the 1980s
and dog-earing pages, he said he now sought to discontinue mailings to his house.
Today, catalogs are a waste of paper, he said. Its the same information thats online.
He said he didnt like to shop without reading product reviews, something often
embedded in e-commerce platforms. Members of the so-called millennial generation,
accustomed to online shopping, may share Mr. Wrights opinion in greater number. Still,
some e-commerce retailers like Bonobos see printed materials as having modern
appeal across age groups and have embraced them.
Craig Elbert, vice president for marketing at Bonobos, called them helpful for building
relationships and for measuring effectiveness. You know if you ultimately made a sale,
he said. You know where you ship a catalog and where you ship your orders. With so
much clutter and information overload, said Rohit Deshpande, a professor of marketing
at Harvard Business School, just getting attention is the hardest thing to do right now
for brands. Its conceivable that trying catalogs again is a way to do it.
Mr. Deshpande said research showed that frequency helped consumers process
marketing messages, but some studies suggested diminishing returns after three
advertisements. The issue has always been: What do we have to do in order to get
mind-share and not bore people? Mr. Deshpande said. Or, worse, turn them off?

SkyMall Stumbles as Airlines Hone Their Sales Pitches

WE might get a little more knee room in coach, now that the familiar SkyMall catalog is
disappearing from that thick stash of printed material the airlines cram into seat-back
pockets.O.K., so well only gain maybe a quarter-inch more space, but at least they
wont charge us a fee for the minimally extra comfort. (I hope.)
As you perhaps have heard, Xhibit, publisher of those SkyMall catalogs full of weird and
often wonderful products that you didnt imagine you needed till you thumbed through a
catalog at 37,000 feet, has filed for bankruptcy protection. The company, which says it
gets substantially all of its revenue from SkyMall, said that its retail catalog business
had been suspended.

For the time being at least, you neednt worry about whether you can still buy SkyMalls
top-selling products, like the grill spatula with an LED light for nighttime barbecuing
($24.95); the self-cleaning robotic cat-litter box ($339.99); the Bigfoot Garden Yeti
statue ($99.95 to $2,250, depending on how big you want it); the Mens Padded Butt
Enhancer ($35 for jockeys, $2 extra for enhanced boxers). Yes, while you may not find
the catalog in your seat-back pocket, SkyMall is still, for now, accepting orders. There
are changes in the air, but were still here! SkyMall proclaims gamely on its online order
site.
There are indeed changes in the air. In its bankruptcy announcement, Xhibit noted that
as more travelers carried personal electronic devices, and with rapidly growing Wi-Fi
availability on airplanes, fewer people browsed the SkyMall in-flight catalog. The
company also cited the rapidly evolving and intensely competitive direct marketing and
online retail business.
There were lesser-known problems faced by SkyMall last year as losses mounted. In
the fourth quarter, a period when the company said it usually books a disproportionate
amount of our retail sales, two major airlines, Delta and Southwest, gave the company
notice that they were dropping the catalogs Delta effective last month and Southwest
effective April 1.
One underlying factor is that airlines, which are swimming in many billions in so-called
ancillary revenue from onboard fees, sales and commissions, are themselves
aggressively selling products.With rapidly growing mobile connectivity on board, airlines
can efficiently market directly to passengers, including through mileage-points offers
and direct sales from their own online catalogs. Merchandise, travel packages, theater
and concert tickets, even restaurant reservations, all are being sold directly by many
airlines in flight, and that revenue potential is growing. Airline executives have been
asking, Who needs SkyMall siphoning off sales? Not that the physical seat-back
environment is a marketing dinosaur. Passengers still reliably reach for the airline inflight magazine at some point during a flight. In fact, American Airlines this month
revamped its American Way in-flight magazine in a new partnership with Ink Global, a
travel media company that publishes more than 40 branded magazines, including
magazines for United Airlines, easyJet, Iberia, Norwegian Air, the Eurostar train and the
corporate jet market. It also develops integrated online and mobile apps for readers and
advertisers. We print over 700,000 magazines each issue, Marisa Beazel, the vice
president for publishing at Ink, said of the redesigned American Way, a monthly
publication tucked into seat pockets on all American flights, now including those of US
Airways, which it acquired in a merger. The last issue of US Airways Magazine was
published in December.

High-end advertisers increasingly demand high-quality print display when they buy
space, and the American Way redesign addresses that, Ms. Beazel said. Weve
upgraded the paper stock, she said, adding, In-flight media is attracting some of the
most affluent audiences in the world, and because of that and our global footprint were
able to attract new types of international advertisers.
The January issue of the new American Way has lots of high-end ads for travel
destinations, fancy watches, luxury condos, top-shelf rums, expensive cigars and
apparel but there is also a smattering of the more familiar lower-end in-flight
magazine advertisers like online dating sites and mens hair restoration products and
services. There is more space for editorial features, though in general they will be
shorter and easier to consume for a domestic and growing international readership,
said Fernand J. Fernandez, the airlines vice president for global marketing.
The magazines website has also been redesigned for smoother integration between
the print product that people peruse on a plane and the digital imprint that Ink is
building out for us, Mr. Fernandez said. Ms. Beazel added, citing the global advertising
network associated with an array of in-flight magazines, there is a lot of opportunities
for engagement on a larger scale than just reading the magazine.
Still, with all the fancy, digitally integrated reach to link high-end advertisers with affluent
condo buyers and fancy rum drinkers, many fliers are still going to miss that quirky
SkyMall catalog when they get bored with their technology and reach into the seat-back
pocket for something to peruse on paper. Last week, with SkyMalls apparent demise,
my favorite comment on the news came from a woman who declared on Twitter, And I
really needed that gnome.

The Weird Science of Naming New Products

The announcement came in November with two names attached: one famous, one not,
or at least not yet. The famous name was Paul McCartney. Anyone who wanted to try a
virtual-reality experience starring the former Beatle replicating the sensation of
standing center stage with him as he sang Live and Let Die to 70,000 screaming fans
had only to download a special video file, put the file into an app for their Android
phone and slip the phone into a cardboard headset designed by Google. The not-yetfamous name was of the virtual-reality production process that created this experience.
Reviewers said it was mind-blowingly cool and an exciting preview of the future, but
it was also so novel that it had been hard to think of a word to label it. Its inventors had
wanted a name that would lodge in the public consciousness the same way Dolby and
Imax and Blu-ray had. A name that could become a verb as well as a noun. An iconic
name. A name for the ages.
Finding such a name wasnt easy. Starting in April 2013, the production process itself
went through what has become a fairly standard development story for tech start-ups:
The three founders Tom Annau, Jens Christensen and Arthur van Hoff, all computer
scientists and resident entrepreneurs at a venture-capital firm called Redpoint
began with a flash of insight, then wrote code for the software, then assembled a
hardware prototype, then raised more than $34 million from investors, including Google.
But initially, they couldnt come up with a name. The three batted around a few
possibilities, Christensen says, but it very quickly became apparent we werent going
anywhere. We really needed help. They had already hired a San Francisco-based
branding and design agency called Character to help shepherd their production process
to the marketplace, and it was Character that took them to Anthony Shore.
Shore, 47, is what is known in the arcane world of corporate branding as a namer. He is
boyish, ebullient and voluble, which is only natural for someone who makes his living
from words. As a child, Shore found himself entranced by language, and when he
received the American Heritage Dictionary as a birthday present, he pored over a
supplement on the roots of Indo-European words in much the manner that other kids
memorized batting averages. (He still has the book on a shelf in his office in Oakland,
Calif.) He studied linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and wrote a
senior thesis on Latin and moraic theory. There wasnt a lot of work for linguists, so he
fell back on another preoccupation, fonts, and became a typesetter for a real estate
magazine. Typesetting led him to graphic design, graphic design led him briefly to
advertising and advertising led him to naming, beginning with cocktails at Hotel De Anza
in San Jose. Shore spent 13 years at one of the oldest and largest branding firms,
Landor Associates, and a year at the branding behemoth Lexicon before deciding in
2009 to open his own one-man naming agency, Operative Words.
Now he met the three entrepreneurs at their office in Menlo Park. They showed him
their 32-lens camera something that looked like Sputnik, Shore says then he put
on a headset, and they fired up a standard-issue V.R. demo. He was immediately

teleported to a computer-generated Tuscan villa. Shore was impressed. But still, it

looked like a computer game. The engineers then loaded a new file, and when Shore
looked around the room through the headset, he saw the three inventors tossing a Nerf
ball. Only they werent. Shore was watching a virtual-reality movie of them tossing a
Nerf ball. This time Shore was astonished. It was completely real, he says. It was
transportive. Shore had named everything from companies to products to websites to
ingredients to colors. He was responsible for some 160 distinct names in all, including
SoyJoy (the health bar), Lytro (the camera) and Yum! (the parent company of KFC,
Pizza Hut and Taco Bell), as well as lesser-known names like Avaya, Enormo,
Fanhattan, Freescale, Homestyler, Kixx, Mylo, Pause, Rig, Scribe, Spontania,
Valchemy, Wanderful and Zact. But the new V.R. production process posed a particular
challenge. It was manifestly different, Shore told himself. It could have a profound
influence on entertainment culture and on how people connect with one another. He
needed a name that would convey its magnitude a great name.
For decades, corporations have turned to creative people for their naming needs, with
varying results. In 1955, a Ford Motor marketing executive recruited the modernist poet
Marianne Moore to name the companys new car. The marketing department had
already created a list of 300 candidates, all of which, the executive confessed, were
characterized by an embarrassing pedestrianism. Could the poet help? In a series of
letters, Moore proposed dozens of notably nonpedestrian names Intelligent Whale,
Pastelogram, Mongoose Civique, Utopian Turtletop, Varsity Stroke but the marketing
team rejected them all, instead naming the new car (in one of the great disasters,
naming and otherwise, in corporate history) after Henry Fords son, Edsel. Today
roughly 500,000 businesses open each month in the United States, and every one
needs a name. From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J.K. Rowling with her sour
Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character.
Politicians know that calling a bill the USA Patriot Act makes it a little harder to vote
against. The effects of strategic naming are all around us, once we begin to look for
them. You go to a restaurant, and you dont order dolphin fish,' Shore points out. You
order mahi-mahi. You dont order Patagonian toothfish. You order Chilean sea bass.
You dont buy prunes anymore; theyre now called dried plums.' Maria Cypher, the
founder and director of the naming agency Catchword, which named the McDonalds
McBistro sandwich line, will tell you that names give us a shared understanding of what
something is. Paola Norambuena, the executive director of verbal identity at Interbrand,
says they give us a shortcut to a good decision.
Most people assume that companies name themselves and their products. True, Steve
Jobs came up with the name for Apple and stuck with it despite the threat of a lawsuit
from the Beatles, who had already claimed the name for their record label. Likewise,
Richard Branson chose the name Virgin, and namers venerate him for it. Virgin gets a
reaction, says Eli Altman, the head of A Hundred Monkeys, a naming agency. There is
no way that would get through a boardroom. Most executives arent as imaginative as
Jobs or Branson. And thats where namers come in. Some work within larger branding
agencies, like Landor or Interbrand. Others work within boutiques, like Catchword, A
Hundred Monkeys (put 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters, and eventually theyll write a

Shakespearean tragedy, or a name), Namebase and Zinzin (French for whatchamacallit). Some, like Shore, are lone operators.
For the process that leads to a single name, companies can pay anywhere from $3,000
to $75,000. If that name becomes the foundation of a branding campaign, they can pay
tens of millions of dollars more to establish its presence in the commercial firmament.
The results can be inspired, but they can also be laughable. When Stephen Wolf took
over USAir in the late 1990s, he concluded that the name sounded like that of a regional
carrier, and he hired the branding firm Luxon Carra to find him a new name that fit his
larger aspirations. The new name was unveiled in February 1997 to great fanfare. USAir
was now ... US Airways. The process of rebranding, from reprinting the stationery to
repainting the planes, took nine months and, by one account, eventually cost the
company nearly $40 million.
The namers craft may attain its highest expression in the pharmaceutical industry, in
large part because namers have to work within so many government restrictions. Every
drug name must be analyzed by the F.D.A.s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research
to make sure that it doesnt make extravagant claims the hair restoring medication
Rogaine was originally named Regain, until the F.D.A. nixed it and that it cannot be
mistaken for any other medication, which is how Losec, a heartburn treatment, became
Prilosec, so as not to be confused with Lasix, a diuretic. (The F.D.A.s guide on Best
Practices in Developing Propriety Names for Drugs is a dense 33 pages.) The F.D.A.
even runs handwriting tests on potential names to see if pharmacists might mistake one
scribbled drug name on a prescription for another.
The oddity is that for all the weight a company places on choosing names, the decisions
arise from a process that couldnt be less corporate. There are no naming metrics, no
real way to know if a new name helps or hinders. The field attracts people who are
comfortable with such ambiguity. Jay Jurisich, the founder of Zinzin, is a painter with an
M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Jim Singer, who founded
Namebase, was a jingle writer, and Margaret Wolfson, who now runs naming at
Namebase, still splits her time between naming and performing one-woman shows
around the world in which she recites classical myths. The renowned pharma namer
Arlene Teck (coiner of Viagra, from vigorous and Niagara) writes haiku. Maria Cypher
of Catchword fronts a rock band. Other namers are stand-up comics, photographers,
rappers, linguists and poets. A good name has the potency of any piece of art, says
Martin McMurray, a partner at Zinzin. Wolfsons friend Jonathan Galassi, the president
and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has told her that she is engaged in creating
practical poetry, an assessment that Wolfson embraces, though she says she doesnt
use the term with all her clients.
What namers share is a love of words and a sensitivity to them, and they will tell you
that that sensitivity is what separates them from amateurs. At Interbrand, they
administer a test to aspiring namers. One question asks candidates to choose from

short list of names for a new margarine. Many select Margi-Gras, because it is festive
and different. But, Norambuena says, a professional namer would see the negative
associations with Fat Tuesday and reject it.
After Shore had his virtual-reality encounter, he got to work. The first thing he wanted
to know was how the inventors defined the most salient characteristics of their
production process: What made it new, different, amazing? In the naming business, this
sort of interrogation is known as the brief. When namers ask these questions,
companies often respond by giving them hundreds of pages of research or even slickly
produced videos. But too often the executives struggle to articulate what makes their
companies or products distinctive, and so namers must draw it out of them which is
why Jay Jurisich of Zinzin calls this first phase corporate group therapy. Shore learned
that the inventors wanted something short, preferably one word. It needed to convey the
idea of transport and also seem hip and consumer-friendly, in a manner that suggested
advanced technology. The founders wanted it to have a science-fiction feel to it. When
Shore asked them about names they liked, Christensen said Tesla and Imax.
That was enough to get started. Shore settled into his home office in the hills above
Oakland and considered his naming objectives, or what the name ought to do. Taking
off from the inventors comments, he kept returning to the idea of transport: It puts you
somewhere else. Shore says he always starts with a simple, concrete idea and then
tries to elevate it to some overriding, overarching idea that is much more abstract. So
he began riffing. Change of place elevated tomotion, then motion elevated to speed,
then speed elevated tophysical space, then physical space elevated to just plain space.
So now Im thinking about space and location.
Eventually, he settled on six elements that would serve as the basis of his names. He
calls these concepts his creative directions, though other namers call them buckets,
places they can dump names that they associate with a given concept. Shores were:
change (in location and time), entertainment, experience, immersion, presence and
reality and, finally, WOW!
With his creative directions established, he set out to find names that gestured in those
directions. He asked himself: What would be thesound of going from one place to
another instantly? He began mapping the concept of instant travel to the sounds he
decided upon. He knew that speed could be conveyed by what linguists call fricatives,
which are consonants produced by forcing air through the narrow channel between
tongue and front teeth or tongue and upper palate or tongue and molars: f, s, v, z. And
he knew that the point of arrival could be conveyed by stops or plosives, which are
consonants in which the air flow is blocked: b, d, p, t. The exercise produced names like
Slide or Slyde.
The techniques Shore was using are a relatively recent innovation one that makes
the messy process seem more scientific. Will Leben was a linguistics professor at
Stanford in 1988 when he got a call from Lexicon asking if its partners could visit him. At
the time, Leben was teaching a course on the structure of English words, and Lexicon
recruited him for a project: to create a list of morphemes, those parts of words that

contain meaning. Using a thesaurus, Leben generated a long list of morphemes and the
meanings of each pages and pages of morphemes, Leben says, which Lexicon
could then draw upon to create names that would express the nature of a particular
product.
A few years later, David Placek, Lexicons founder, asked Leben what he thought of a
name they had conjured, Triples, for a new cereal from General Mills that contained
three different grains. It sounds like something thats light and crunchy, Leben recalls
telling them. He says their jaws dropped. Could the sound of a word say as much as its
content? The idea of sound symbolism went back to at least Platos Cratylus, in which
he associated sounds with physical characteristics, but linguists tended to discredit it. It
had long been a fundamental tenet of linguistics, Leben says, that the association
between the meaning of the word and its pronunciation is an arbitrary one. The reason
why we call a piano a piano has nothing to do with the sounds p-i-a-n-o.
But Placek was intrigued, and he asked Leben to conduct a study to determine whether
sounds did indeed convey physical properties. Leben called his study Sounder. He
administered a questionnaire to 150 Stanford and Berkeley students, asking them
questions like: Which sounds faster, fip or fop? Leben found a consensus. Fip was
faster than fop. Why? Because of the way the sounds were generated in the mouth,
Leben says. Fip feels lighter and faster because the vocal tract is open only a small
amount. There is less acoustic substance for fip than there is for fop, the
pronunciation of which causes the jaw to drop and the tongue to lower, creating a
heavier, more powerful sound. There were many similar discoveries among fricatives
and plosives, leading Leben to conclude that the physical characteristics of sound are
what determine associations. Significantly, Leben got the same results when the study
was conducted overseas. Lexicon took the idea and ran with it. Pentium began with a
plosive that signified energy, power and dynamism. The S of the Swiffer mop made it
sound fast and easy. The D of Dasani water made it sound heavier. Leben says: It
doesnt say refreshing. It says slow down, cool off, relax.'
Next, Placek asked Leben if he could conduct a study to see if there might be an
association between sounds and emotional states. That was Sounder II, conducted in
2002. The results came out so clean, it was hard to believe, Leben says. Certain
sounds, for example, were associated with daring or liveliness or sadness or insecurity.
But Sounder I and II concentrated exclusively on the initial sounds of a word its first
consonant or vowel or both. Sounder III, just concluded last summer, asked whether
consonants and vowels in other positions in a word might have a similar or additive
effect. They did. Among the discoveries Leben made: Fricatives convey faster and
smaller as do vowels that are voiced near the front of the mouth, like the a in bat
or the i in hid. Plosives, or stops, convey slower and bigger as do vowels that
are voiced at the back of the throat, like the o in token or the double os in food. Socalled voiceless stops like k, p, and t are more alive and daring than voiced stops like b,
d and g, while the voiceless convey less luxury than the voiced. And all sound-symbolic
effects manifest differently depending on context. They take on properties of the product

being named. In his search for just the right sounds, Shore used an app, called
Universal Text Combination Generator, to create a list of 7,500 names combining
fricatives and stops. Getting some help from computers has become de rigueur among
namers, who perhaps in part to reassure their corporate clients have devised
proprietary and often highly confidential software to assist in the naming process. Some
of these programs mash together roots of words to form new words. Some find rhymes.
Some focus on speech. One company, Idiom, promotes a system it calls Lingtwistics,
which, according to its website, is an algorithm that deconstructs these naming
ingredients, then reassembles them in unexpected ways. (The name Lingtwistics was
itself generated by the algorithm.)
Like most namers, though, Shore doesnt believe that computers can replace human
creativity. For Shore, sound symbolism was only the beginning. He didnt just want
words that sounded right. Shore liked natural words, words that carried semantic and
even historic meaning. He kept coming back to the notion that this invention was like
something out of science fiction. Looking for inspiration, he watched the movie
Jumper, which is about teleportation, and began examining a website called the
Glossary of Science Fiction Ideas, Technology and Inventions. There were 2,400
entries, and Shore studied them all. Two, however, popped out. One was Jumpdoor,
which referred to a teleportation device, still Shores go-to idea. And the other was
Jaunte Stage, described as a little place to teleport, first used in a 1956 novel, The
Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, which served as inspiration for a Stephen King
story titled The Jaunt.
This is the point in his search at which Shore sits at his computer and opens window
after window, making lists of words and then trying to make connections among the
words on those lists and then putting potential candidates for the final name on a master
list. It is an act of computerized mind meld, and it goes on for hours every day for days
at a time. If the search seems chaotic, that is the point. The idea is to do everything
to leave no word unturned. He visits the website onelook.com, which shows how words
work with other words, or sketchengine.co.uk, which combs texts and concordances,
flags parts of speech and shows how a specific word appears in billions of words of text.
He visits rhymezone.com to find all the words that rhyme with a word. That is how he
came up with the name for an ideation application for the Palm Pilot he began with
brain, looked for rhyming words and concluded with BrainForest. For this project, he
thought of words about travel, but also about entertainment, the sense of engagement,
connection, energy, even spheres. And he laid them all out on an Excel spreadsheet
1,200 names in all by the time he had finished.
For a single project, namers can come up with as many as 6,500 names. Big naming
companies will do anywhere from 40 to 50 projects a year, and smaller ones 15 to 20,

which adds up to a lot of names. Of course, only one name will be chosen for each
project, and that is the only one the client will own. The rest, however, wont necessarily
go to waste. Every naming agency keeps a list of its discards in a computer program.
These are then classified by message (at Catchword); by distinctiveness, appeal,
memorability and concept (at Interbrand); or by whatever other way the namers might
want to retrieve them. Catchword has 650 of these categorized lists. And many of the
names will be recycled, which suggests that there is a kind of Platonic ideal of good
names, independent of products good or bad a name so good that it could work, if
not on anything, than at least on many things. Three weeks after he first experienced
the results of the new virtual-reality production process, Shore paid a second visit to
Menlo Park this time with 61 names he had culled from his master list of 1,200. Using
PowerPoint, he presented the names one by one with an explanation of the meaning of
each. And he presented them in what amounted to a narrative, bunching all the names
that connoted one characteristic and moving from that characteristic to the next in an
arc that he thought had a strong beginning and a boffo ending.
The first name was Virch, for virtual reality. Then Amuzium (he thought the ium read
elemental). Then Thrall, which was emotive but also had a negative suggestion of
surrender. Then Thrillium. Howl. Mezmer. Joyager (the inventors immediately liked that
one). Livit. Physic. Tactene. Tether (tying one to an experience). Lash. Splicefield.
Velop. Engulf (very direct). Respace (another favorite). Skylume. Coil (potential
energy). Midst (I was interested in repurposing words from another era). Zyde (from
reside). Jaunt (a short journey for pleasure). Trav. Trave. Translo. Zonic (sonic but
faster). Popover (they loved this name). When he was done, two hours later,
Christensen, van Hoff and Annau listed their favorites, compared them and then handed
the winners to Shore. That was the end of Round 1.
Typically there are two rounds in each naming project, though larger clients and tougher
jobs may require three or four. With the lists in hand, Shore retreated to his home to
generate a revised set of 50 names, now that he knew what sorts of names the
inventors seemed to like (Glidesight, Latch, Plasm, Sheen, Splicewire and Telescape,
among others).
Getting clients to accept a name is the hardest part of a namers job. Shore calls it the
branders paradox: Having asked for a whole new identity, the client is terrified to accept
it. Were taxed with doing something different, Shore says, yet those are the very
things that might be off-putting or scary. This is one reason namers make a point of
discussing the origins of their names; explaining the chain of reasoning behind an
unfamiliar word can make it come to sound not just natural but inevitable. Even so,
some of the best names wind up in the bin, which is why Paola Norambuena of

Interbrand says she makes it a practice never to argue for a name or to fall in love with
one. Naming will break your heart.
Then there is the issue of trademarks. Before any company or product name can be
registered and legally protected, it must pass an evaluation by the Patent and
Trademark Office to determine whether it has already been taken. Almost every
naturally occurring word has been claimed, which is why namers so often arrive at
portmanteaus (Accenture derives from accent and future) or drop vowels (Flickr and
Tumblr) or change letters (Lyft). Coming up with a good name is hard, Margaret
Wolfson says. Coming up with a great name is even harder. Coming up with a name
that passes trademark! ... " There are roughly two million active trademarks in the
United States, and 5,000 new applications are filed with the trademark office each
week. At least half do not pass, often because they happen to be merely similar to
another name. Shores Respace, which the inventors liked, would be deemed too close
to a digital-services firm named Redspace, so the name eventually dropped out. A
company can try to buy out another company that has a name it covets, but it can get
messy. That is why Shore and other namers subject their candidates to a preliminary
trademark screening before a client becomes attached to a name it cannot have. And
trademarks dont have to be cleared only in the United States. For companies and
products overseas, they have to be cleared in each country.
Vetting names internationally means considering cultural issues as well. Lexicon has 84
linguists around the world who make sure names dont ruffle local sensitivities. By one
account, linguists rejected the drug name Soarus because it sounded like tsouris,
Yiddish for trouble. Similarly, Wolfson once had to convince a client that a product
named Care 4 would not sell in China because the number 4 signifies death. One
American company, Good Characters, is devoted entirely to coming up with Chinese
names for other American companies wanting to do business in China.
In pharmaceutical naming, the hurdles are, of course, even higher which has led
some pharma namers to abandon semantically grounded names altogether. At ixxo, a
naming firm based in Switzerland, Denis Ezingeard, the managing director, has devised
a method that focuses entirely on visual and aural names, on the principle that the less
semantic freight a word carries, the better. He says his process draws on jazz,
nonrepresentational art, bird-watching and Darwinian evolution. His rationale is that the
names dont mean anything in linguistic terms, which makes it easier for them to pass
regulation. Ezingeard may be onto something in a business in which companies are
running out of words. The companys own name, ixxo, is a product of its method. It
looks and sounds right, but it isnt a real word. It is an impression something
Ezingeard made up.

With the prescreening completed late in August, Shore returned to the inventors office
for the last time with his 50 final candidates. Once again, he projected the names on a
screen in context and explained his reasoning for choosing each. But by this time,
Christensen, van Hoff and Annau were seasoned evaluators. The names were even
better, Christensen says.
After Shore left, they wrote the finalists on a whiteboard on their office wall and began
deliberating. The contenders included Popover, FarAcross, Jaunt, Jumpdoor and
Lunge. Christensen lobbied hard for Jaunt, which had grown on him because of its
science-fiction origins. But one partner thought it was too high-toned, too Britishsounding. Jumpdoor was still a favorite, and Respace hadnt yet fallen out. For days,
the partners debated the possibilities, and the weight of the decision was considerable.
It is kind of all or nothing, Christensen says about their name choice.
What Shore didnt tell them was that even if the name they chose received a tepid
reception, the power of their production process could still overcome it. Most namers will
tell you, as Paola Norambuena puts it, that a great name cant fix a bad product. A
great product can fix a bad name. Accenture was met with derision for reminding
people of dentures. Gap was an empty space. Yelp was a dog in pain. The iPad was
confused with a tampon. Now these names have no odd connotations at all, thanks to
the success of the things they name.
So it may have been that after hours upon hours of brainstorming and hours more of
deliberations and still hours more of trademark searches, and after the expenditure of
tens of thousands of dollars, not as much was at stake as Christensen, van Hoff and
Annau thought at least not in commercial terms. Personal and emotional stakes were
a different story. Christensen says selecting the name was a milestone, though he
doesnt remember exactly how or when they settled on their choice. Shore got the news
via an email telling him that they had chosen a name and that it had been granted
trademark approval. Now it was theirs.
It would be seven more months before the company was ready to come out to the
public. In that time, the inventors moved their operations to Palo Alto. They formed a
board of advisers, which included the chairman of Imax. They began making
arrangements to record events like the McCartney concert and even make V.R. movies.
And then, when they were ready, one afternoon last April, they invited the press to their
unveiling. Reporters who entered the office were greeted by a large sign affixed to the
wall with the companys name in a futuristic-looking font. Of course, they had no idea
what went into selecting the word on that sign. It simply said:
Jaunt.